Category: development

This week Kyle and Dan discuss UI improvements from Sasank and Dan’s new Fluid Stylesheets, using Git and GitLab to manage DPK files, managing Favorites with Unified Navigation and some “Gotchas” Kyle found during his 8.55 upgrade project.

I want to share a tip Daniel Palmer gave on the psadmin.io Community about faster PeopleBooks searching.

“For the Chrome users: If you want a quick PeopleBooks search you can add a custom search engine by right clicking on the address bar and selecting “Edit Search Engines”. I have added one with the name “PeopleBooks 8.55”, the keyword pb855 and the search url is http://www.oracle.com/pls/psft/search?word=%s&lib=pt855pbr1“

Part of our change in attitude with Fluid Navigation was understanding how to use the new Navigation tools available with Fluid, especially Tiles and Navigation Collections. I talk about creating a PS Admin Fluid Tile to simplify my navigation in PeopleSoft and how I enjoy using that Tile. In the video demo below, I’ll show you how to create a PS Admin Fluid Tile so you can simplify your navigation in PeopleSoft.

This week, Dan and Kyle talk about testing different web server configurations, using the ACM for Elasticsearch, and how mobile browsers work with websites. Then, they discuss different ways to promote yourself and your position to a boss or organization.

I was looking through my web server logs and noticed that they contained a large amount of 404 errors for /apple-touch-icon*.png and /favicon.ico requests. The /apple-touch-icon*.png requests come from mobile devices (mostly iOS, but also some Android) and all browsers will look for the favicon.ico image file. Here is 24 hours of our top 404 requests:

The files are used as an icon if the a user saves the website to their device’s homepage, or it shows up on pinned tabs and bookmarks. That’s a nice feature, but I want to clean up my log files and removing the extraneous 404 responses. Let’s generate the images that mobile devices and browsers expect and clean up our log files. As an added benefit, we’ll generate some nice icons to add polish to our application and be more mobile-friendly.

Create apple-touch-icon.png

The first step is to decide what image you want as the icon. For my demo system, I’ll use “io” logo; it’s a simple and clean logo that will look good as a small icon. It’s best to choose and image that will look good as a square. Because phones and tablets use different size icons, we could go through the work of creating different sizes by hand, but there is web site that does all the work for us: RealFavIconGenerator.

The site is simple to work with – upload the image you want to use, change any configuration for the different images and site title, then download a zip file. You’ll also get some HTML elements to add to your signon page (signin.html if you are using the default file)

A preview of your icon on iOS, Android, and browser tabs:

The site also generates some HTML elements to put in the <head> section of your login page. All browsers will read these values to determine which icons files to use.

Deploy the Touch Icons

At this point, we have some HTML to add to our signin.html file, and a zip file that we need to deploy and extract. We can manually modify and copy each file to the web server, but let’s use the DPK and Puppet to deploy these files.

Before and After for Mobile Devices

Here are two screen shots from my iPhone when I add PeopleSoft to the homepage. In the first screenshot you can see the icon is a tiny version of the login page and the title is generic. In the second screenshot (after deploying the files) you can see the excellent icon and the simple title.

Before

After

One annoyance with Change Assistant (among a few) is that you have to start it “as Administrator”. If you don’t, you’ll get the message “Another instance of Change Assistant is already running” (even though it’s not). While running a program “as Administrator” is not hard, there is no reason why Change Assistant needs Administrative rights. (At least that I know of).

Folder Security

The fix to run Change Assistant without Administrator is to set the folder security permissions correctly. If you install Change Assistant to the default directory, C:\Program Files\PeopleSoft\Change Assistant, the Change Assistant folder security needs to be updated. Grant the user (or group) who will be running Change Assistant Full Control over the directory. In my case, I granted the group “Authenticated Users” full access to the folder.

Now you can start Change Assistant as a normal application.

PeopleTools Idea

There is an Idea on the Oracle PeopleSoft Space for the PeopleTools team to fix this. If you want to vote for the Idea, you can do that here.

I don’t remember where I originally saw this solution, so I can’t give appropriate credit, but I want to thank whoever posted about this in the past.

This week on the podcast, Dan and Kyle talk about load balancing all environments or some environments, Diagnostic Plugins and syntax coloring code. Then, they dive into the getting current and how to test PeopleTools Patches.